Defiant Hope/Life-Sustaining Way

In the late 1970s, my parents left everyone they loved and everything they knew to begin new lives with their three little children in the U.S. They arrived on Pan Am flight to New York City as immigrants, without knowing a stitch of English or much else about life in America. What they did know was that they wanted better opportunities and brighter futures for themselves and their children.

As many immigrant stories go, ours was fairly typical. The morning after arriving, Mom wandered through the city in search of a job, gesticulating her way into a grim sweatshop in mid-town Manhattan. For the next several years, we hardly saw her because of her seamstress'16 hour work day.

Dad, on the other hand, wasn't as lucky as she was. He bounced from job to job, first working 18 hours a day at a small grocery store; he quit a few weeks later after almost getting mangled in an industrial trash compactor. Then he worked at a fish market as a preparer, where the hours were more regular. We thought this job would be more sustainable until he started going home with fish scales embedded into his hands, inflamed and infected..

While our parents toiled, we raised ourselves as latch key kids in a one-bedroom apartment, spending most of our time watching television and munching on junk food. Being the oldest, Brother at 6 years old, was responsible for Sister and me. For lunch, he would climb up a milk crate and warm us up some beef-flavored ramen noodles. For dinner, he would make rice and fry up some SPAM.

Eventually, our parents were able to start a small business. They continued to work long hours. In the Fall of 2000, 25 years after bringing us to the US, I got my Dad to pinky swear that he was going to retire. Now that his kids were independent adults, he had no reason to continue to overwork himself.

That winter, at the age of 62, Dad was diagnosed with what the doctor said was unlocalized melanoma. The oncologist said that he was in the final stages and gave him only six months to live even with an aggressive treatment of chemotherapy and radiology.

The family was devastated. Decades of building a life in spite of a hostile and sometimes destructive system in spite of sweatshops and unhealthy jobs and poor nutrition and now all of it was going to be torn down in a few short months by cancer.

But Dad was not ready to die he had come too far. Weakened by the cancer and the years of toil, his body could no longer handle the meat-heavy diet he had grown accustomed to. Instead, his body sought out nutrition with healing powers, and he found himself embracing a vegan diet. In addition, his mind found refuge in health-restoring practices, like Qigong, meditation, and creating an herb garden on our apartment's fire escape.

We didn't have the words to articulate it at the time, but we sensed that our dad was again embarking us on a journey an immigration as profound as our earlier one. Our Dad was launching us on an exodus of joyous, life-affirming defiance, of conscious living in the face of death, of hope for the future in the face of a heartbreaking present.

But this time, the children were able to take the lead in our passage into a vegan lifestyle. Brother signed us up with the local food co-op so we could buy the organic vegetables and herbs that were beginning to form the life-sustaining core of our new vegan diet. Mom, the traditional ethnic cook, was joined at the stove by Sister who, before Dad's illness, never stepped foot into the kitchen. And I learned some massage therapy techniques to assist Dad with his pain management.

Admittedly, our first steps were halting. What we lacked was a guide to help us navigate the world of veganism. We could have used a resource as comprehensive and helpful as the recently published Vegan World Fusion Cuisine, which is so much more than a marvelous cookbook it's a guide to a vegan lifestyle.

Ultimately, Dad was our best teacher. His positive attitude and determination taught us that essential lesson: to live consciously, deliberately, and in harmony with yourself and the world. Dad lived two years, well beyond the six months the Doctors had given him. On one sunny Saturday afternoon, Dad passed away quietly and peacefully in his sleep.

In retrospect, we see clearly. Our journey into veganism had begun as an urgent necessity Dad's need to minimize pain. In time, through practice, a vegan lifestyle became a necessity for the family, to help us all to maximize life to help us truly realize the immigrants' dream of a happier and healthier life.

Yet this dream is not just for immigrants; it's a dream that the whole world shares - for every member of the human family inhabits a world that has grown sick. A world where cancers medical, political, environmental threaten our very existence. The cancer of hunger, as Vegan World Fusion Cuisine reminds us, consumes tens of millions of lives each year. The cancer of desperate poverty undermines political stability and breeds intolerable inequalities. And the cancer of environmental destruction threatens the very planet we live on.

But it doesn't have to be this way. These cancers are curable. We can choose to prioritize life over death, nutrition over hunger, healing over pollution. A vegan lifestyle can be the foundation on that choice. Through a vegan lifestyle, we can reject the cancerous present in favor of a life-sustaining tomorrow.

HeeWon Khym